PERDITA FINN on the Long Story of Our Souls /353
Invoking ancestry, magic, and a deep relationship with the Dead, this week’s guest Perdita Finn invites listeners into a world of mystery. Perdita’s work, including her new book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, calls humanity to engage with a faith in the unseen world, a faith in surrender, and a faith in the other side. For Perdita, this faith is not rooted in an otherworldly abstract idea of spirituality, but rather a grounded, embodied experience.
Following ecology, not theology, Perdita calls us to think about the ecological equation – the reality of bodies feeding other bodies, of death opening a portal to another life. This is a reality that animals, plants, and all our more-than-human kin know well. How can we tap into their earthly wisdom?
As we come to face the existential questions of our time – war, climate change, and disasters of all kinds – Perdita reminds us that we are not alone. We can lean on our ancestors, both human and more-than-human, for strength. As we live into the long story of our souls, what wisdom can we pull from lives beyond this one? Tapping into creativity, resilience and connectedness, life comes after life, comes after life, and the meaning of our cyclical lineage is ever-present.
“People walked across the land and told the stories of their ancestors and those stories sustained people and came up through the Earth. That’s what it means to have songlines again—to be connected to the stories we tell of the Dead and of the Ancestors in our lives.”
Photo of Perdita Finn
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead, in which participants are empowered to activate the magic in their own lives with the help of their ancestors. She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
♫ The music in this episode is “Blue Heron” by The New Runes, “Hold Your Laughter” by Left Vessel, “Time Away from Time” by Eliza Edens, and “Myelin” by Arthur Moon.
Episode References
KATRINA SPADE on New Life from Death /346
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
Take Back the Magic by Perdita Finn
“Magic or Not” by Perdita Finn
“What Every Animal Knows” by Perdita Finn
GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS
Get to know those on the other side – your relatives, sure, but also friends, teachers, plants, trees, vanished species. Collaborate with them. Ask for their guidance, receive their messages, learn the language of the unseen world so that we can stop making such a mess of things. Know that death is not a mistake and it is not the end. Align ourselves with the vast rhythms and the cycles of the earth and tap into our own long story.
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For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.